Original Soundtrack: Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)
I haven't seen the movie in decades, but my impression is that it was pretty bad, a rock band fable (with aspects of the plot later duplicated in Velvet Goldmine) featuring one of the least convincing cinematic bands you can imagine (Tom Berenger being particularly out of his element). But the music was actually pretty great. To create the sound of a New Jersey bar band, they brought in John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band. Now, to say they sound like a poor man's Bruce Springsteen is underplaying how much they sound like Springsteen; at the same time, it doesn't do justice to the music. Yeah, the songs sound largely like outtakes from The River -- but pretty authentic outtakes.
The album is rather slight -- setting aside a by-the-numbers cover of "Runaround Sue" and a couple songs not featuring Cafferty, there's not a lot of running time here. But there are a handful of surprisingly solid tunes, making this something I still pull out and play now and then.
The hit single was "On The Dark Side," and, yeah, it's a 3-chord pop tune with a vibe that apes Springsteen as well as a pre-Mellencamp John Cougar, but what a great pop tune. I can't really say it's a guilty pleasure; it's just flat-out great. "Wild Summer Nights" is the other upbeat winner, something you'd definitely feel perfectly fine pumping your fist in the air to if they played it at the neighborhood bar. On the quieter side, you've got "Tender Years," a long lost Springsteen ballad, sax and all (and, again, not in a "hey, they're ripping off Springsteen" way, but in a "wait, this isn't Springsteen?" way); "Boardwalk Angel" is another nice ballad cut from the same cloth. There are also a few relatively generic tunes that sound like oldies covers you'd expect to hear played in a smoky New Jersey bar (complete with crowd noise), perfectly fine but not memorable.
The album closes with "Season in Hell," which, if I recall the film, was supposed to represent the fictitious band's shelved second album, when they drop the simplistic bar band tunes and move into something deep and profound, a concept album based on the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud that sounds like Jim Morrison trying to recreate Brian Wilson's lost Smile tapes. And the song actually manages to pull off the conceit (well, it sounds more like Springsteen writing another song for Patti Smith, but it's a respectable effort).
Here's Cafferty's video for "On The Dark Side":
They both got their start in '72. They both have standard lineup of bass, keys, guitars, drums and of course sax ;) Their sounds are hard not to compare. But Cafferty has always stuck with his East Coast rock 'n' roll. Springsteen has dallied in many sounds.(Tom Joad, Brilliant Disguise, to name but a few). And Bruce is still reinventing himself in the studio although his tours are fantastic greatest hits packages. Cafferty has dozen's (around 30) of his songs in various movies aside from the classic Eddie & the Cruisers movie. We watched this on VHS til we had to buy another one from wearing it out. This fictional band was who we wanted to be and wanted to believe existed. Berenger was fine as an awkward addition to the gang and everybody idolized Pare in his role. There were far worse movies in the 80's. But don't pigeon hole Cafferty as a Springsteen wannabe. He's got his own cred, and he's earned his stripes. At least in my books. Good review though :)
ReplyDeleteI certainly don't mean to diminish Cafferty; I saw him way back in college, shortly after the film came out, and he put on a terrific show. (I'll admit that I have not listened to any of his work beyond this album.) But it's hard to deny that the movie, or at least the soundtrack, was trying to capture a distinctly Springsteen vibe. Which is a good thing; had the film--which, as I noted, I found kinda unimpressive--opted for a more generic-sounding bar band, it would've had little to recommend it.
DeleteYes, I see what you mean by that… very glad it wasn’t a generic bar band approach. Your blog post prompted me to dust this soundtrack off and listen to it again…. I’m not even embarrassed to say I replayed it for a couple hours while I was refinishing some stairs - the time flew by and I sung every word of every song (used to do “On the Dark Side” in a cover band actually) and it made me feel young all over again. I don’t think we are alone in our appreciation for the music that allowed this movie to live on long past what it should have. The connection to anything in the movie was very closely lied to those tunes peppered throughout the movie. I’m glad I came across your blog.
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